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Movie Review: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Posted by Pile
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[Movie Reviews] |
 I was hoping I wasn't going to regret watching this movie. I guess it depends upon whether I had any significant expectations.... I should have first attended a class of "Defense Against the Dark Arts" to warn me of the impending charm of unoriginality cast over the production of this latest Potter movie. |
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Admittedly, I am not the biggest Harry Potter fan. I've read many of the books. I don't dislike the series. But I don't sleep on Harry Potter bed sheets. I don't drink out of a Harry Potter coffee mug. I'm all out of kool-aid. I don't have an emotional interest in whether Harry Potter hooks up with Hermone Granger or kills Voldemort, and likewise, whether J.K. Rowling buys a purple or silver Rolls Royce and where her next mansion is located.
If you have such investments, and trust me when I say the former is directly tied to the latter, you might want to go into real estate or exotic car sales, because as predicted, the producers of this latest Harry Potter production are going to make out like bandits, feeding the brain dead public with what can only be described now as a fantasy series on auto-pilot, on a railway track, going around in circles, at 2mph, on a humid Sunday afternoon while the Superbowl is on.
I really enjoyed the first few Harry Potters. I welcomed the opportunity to enter this new and amazing world. But with every expansion of the franchise, the originality and creativity gets more thin and watery.
In this latest subscription, Potter gets expelled from school (oh nooos, not in the first ten minutes - we're really scared), then reinstated and then the school gets taken over by a fascist authoritarian woman named Dora Umbridge from the stereotypically-evil Ministry of Magic, aided by a media magnate, appropriately named "Fudge" who forges news headlines to discredit those who disagree with his view of reality. Hmmm, how original. Where could J.K. have gotten this uber-creative plot line involving media manipulation to put an oppressive regime in power?
Being politically-minded, I might have thought, well any vehicle which makes the public aware of modern-day cause-effect issues that are hurting our society can't be all that bad, right? But in Harry Potter's world, all it takes to turn everything into Roses is Rupert Murdoch, um, I mean Fudge, seeing Voldemort and realizing in an instant he was wrong and completely reversing his anti-reality policy. It was at that moment I knew I was in a different world, just like I was certain the writers of this movie intended it to be played in a different world where people are naive enough to consider such a plot line remotely believable.
I asked my friends, "Is this one better than the last Harry Potter?" Because that stupid time-paradox crap at the end of the previous one annoyed me. Even Spielberg couldn't have messed up the end of the movie as bad. And their reply was, "Oh yes, this is much better than the last one. There are a lot more special effects and fighting."
Um, yea... well, what they meant was, hey it's got more computer-generated lightning coming out of those goofy magic wands the characters wield like cue-tips. It's basically a gay version of a Jedi battle between two old men wearing Depends.
Anyway, I won't bore you with details of this movie. Most movie reviews tend to read more like a book report superficially going over the plot lines, but if you've seen any Harry Potter movie, you've seen them all. Let me go over the basics of every Harry Potter plot:
1. Harry starts out in muggle-ville, back with his foster parents where they treat him like crap... he's there not because there's likely any legal/guardianship issues, but because it's just one of those dumbass plot things the story needs.
2. Something happens in the real world and he leaves and goes to magic-land, where he ultimately gets in trouble for something happening. There's always a new teacher, usually filling the ever-vacant "Defense against the dark arts" position which seems to offer job security comparable to a position in the Iraqi Defense Force.
3. In magic land, we're introduced to some new creative aspects of this world.. however, in each subsequent movie, there are less and less new things to discover, and more and more boring CGI and predictable if not tedious development of the story's one-dimensional characters. Just to throw people off, occasionally someone dies or you hear of someone dying. That's supposed to make you feel like there actually is some sense of danger in this goofy realm where people intentionally make jelly beans taste like athlete's foot.
4. Potter sulks; Potter gets angry; Potter gets meloncholic -- usually in the same scene. Nobody understands Potter. He's only the hero of the magic world and the school, but it seems every new semester, everyone at Hoggwarts forgets this and once-again doubts everything he's seen and heard. What? Some new magic has entered our land? Not possible. We're only students learning and experiencing the world of magic ourselves. How dare you suggest you have experienced something we haven't heard of when on a daily basis, we experience something we haven't heard of? Oh wow.
5. Most of the time, there's some big sporting contest and people find it brilliantly creative that Harry doesn't always win. But this is a prelude to the inevitable battle between good and evil, always masked in a slightly moldy coating of "Is he a good guy or a bad guy?" In the end there's a showdown involving lots of computers generating all kinds of particle effects. Intel wins.
6. Harry Potter prevails.. kinda.. well, evil isn't vanquished.. it's merely pushed back into its hole for another year or two while the next subscription, I mean script, is readied. And every subsequent day at Hoggwarts is like Christmas.
There you have it. Every Harry Potter movie ever made. |
I give this movie 5/10. |
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the movie
Posted by nicole on 2007-08-02 15:08:12 | | this movie wasint the greatest out of all 5 but the effects were increadible.i am looking forward to the next movie and see what they can create.personaly i think the sixth book will be the most interesting movie so far.after reading the sixth book i want to be one of the characters! |
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